I didn’t want to write about this.

I wanted to write about my wild and crazy party weekend in New York City with my best friend Blue. I wanted to write about going to Shea to see the Mets and having a large drunk man fall on us in the stands. I wanted to write about beating Blue at Ping Pong for the first time in my life (bringing my career record against him to a blistering 1-73). I wanted to write about all the stupid jokes and funny stories that happen when you hang out with someone you’ve known for 26 years.

But then it happened.

Blue was taking me to a show. Not Broadway, as I had thought, but “off-off-off-off-Broadway”, according to him. He wouldn’t tell me what it was because he didn’t want me to go into it with any preconceived notions. So I didn’t know if we were attending a play featuring a naked Harry Potter or watching some bad street performance.

Turns out, it was a little of both.

The last time Blue and I went to dinner and a show was several years ago when we grabbed some pizza and attended “Taller Than a Dwarf” with Matthew Broderick and Parker Posey. The play was sort of interesting but not that memorable. The night, though, was.

During the play, my stomach started grumbling. So did Blue’s. As line after line was delivered and each act unfolded onto the next one, we began to realize that the $3 pizza slices might have been a bad idea.

When the lights came up, we bolted. For the bathrooms. We sat on those porcelain stalls like they were our lifelines, cursing the gods of baked dough and melted cheese and struggling to survive an embarrassing situation.

Eventually, a security guard came into the bathroom after the theater was empty and turned off the lights.

“We’re still in here!” I shouted.

“Hurry up!” he shouted back.

There was an awkward pause. Finally, I replied:

“We’re doing the best we can.”

Enough years have gone by that Blue and I can laugh about it now. This past Saturday’s incident, however, might take more time.

The mystery show turned out to be Fuerza Bruta, a surreal revolving stage performance featuring a lot of kinetic energy, wind, and water that looks like Circue d’ Soleil on LSD.

Blue and I had eaten at Arturo’s Pizza earlier, sharing the most incredible half-bacon, half-sausage pie (probably one of the best I have ever had). I finished a half-carafe of red wine on my own.

“Hmm,” Blue said, “pizza and a show in New York. Seem familiar?”

When we arrived at the Fuerza Bruta show, I was feeling a bit tipsy. We walked in and immediately I was wondering what the hell was going on. Everyone was forced to stand inside a circle in the center of a dark room. One guy took off his shirt. A bachelorette party came in with each drunk woman wearing a mask. I started to wonder if Blue had brought me to an orgy.

The show started with a man running on a treadmill above our heads. Strobe lights started to splinter the dark. Wind and water were sprayed everywhere. People started to jump, dance, and cheer. Everyone would move around in unison, pushing us around the “stage” into different formations.

I stared up and got dizzy. I lost my place. I lost myself. I looked for Blue and couldn’t find him.

And then my stomach started to hurt.

The ceiling above us became a see-through mylar swimming pool. Half naked women swam across it as we all watched and cheered.

I looked around for the emergency exits.

The swimming pool ceiling started to be lowered slowly. The wet women got closer and closer and soon they were claustrophobically on our heads. Everyone raised their hands to “touch” the swimming women.

I told Blue I had to get out of there.

Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the pizza. Maybe it was the Italian sausage and hot dog I had at Shea that afternoon. Maybe it was radically changing my diet after a week of observing Passover’s dietary restrictions. Maybe it was the heat in the Fuerza Bruta room. Maybe it was the strobe lights and the psychokinetic energy.

Maybe it was everything.

I buckled over and everything went dark. Blue pushed me to the red EXIT sign.

“Is he ok?” I could hear people ask.

I was catatonic. I couldn’t talk or walk. Blue somehow got me downstairs and to the bathroom. I sat on that toilet feeling like I was going to die. I sat there wishing I would die. This, I thought, is was being poisoned must feel like.

It took 30 minutes for me to open my eyes and stand up. The 70-minute show was still beating through the walls. I apologized to a sympathetic Blue and said, “Let’s catch the end of the show.”

We walked upstairs and entered the room. One minute later, the show ended.

Now, Blue says I didn’t ruin his birthday and that I shouldn’t feel bad for blowing the tickets he paid (discount price) for. But he did say that I shouldn’t sugar coat this story in my blog. That my best blogging is done not when I try to control my online image in a flattering way but when I’m honest to everyone about who I really am. Easy for him to say, he doesn’t have a blog.

So here’s my unflattering story, the one I didn’t want to write about, the one that doesn’t make me seem funny or witty or attractive to strangers. It’s very unflattering. Very honest.

And one more thing. On the way out of Fuerza Bruta, I heard a woman behind me sum up the show to her friend:

“This show would have been amazing if I was on psychodelic drugs.”

Really? I wanted to say to her, you should have had what I was on.

My friend GoPats asked me in today’s comments:

Why don’t you blog from the wired wifi super bus?”

Having known him 9 years, I knew he was due to come up with a good idea. So here I am, on my very first BoltBus trip, writing to a total of five readers who Sitemeter tells me are currently on my blog (it’s Friday night, go out). Our WiFi connection keeps going in and out so I can’t guarantee that I can stay online or that it will even be entertaining, but I’m nothing if not determined to make you laugh.

Like a clown.

6:27PM: The bus is about to leave and the very first thing I have noticed about BoltBus is the silly people with their silly laptops (I am NOT excluding myself). The first thing everyone did was look for seats with sockets in front of them. Not two minutes went by before everyone took out their laptops and checked their e-mails.

6:35PM: Arjewtino: “Excuse me, driver, do you have the network code to get online?”
Random girl who thinks I was talking to her: “You don’t need a network code.”
Bus driver who just became my new best friend: “Actually, yes you do.”
Arjewtino to random girl: “Suck it.”

7:36PM: We lost Internet pretty much when we started the drive. Everyone is freaking out. There’s pandemonium. If we can’t GChat while on a moving conductor we’ll just about die. I entertained myself by watching an episode from the first season of Perfect Strangers. Don’t judge me. It’s a great show. That Balki!! So foreign and stupid!

I’m taking the BoltBus to NYC tonight to see Blue. It’s his 33rd birthday and we’re going to par-tay like we’re 23 again. Which translates to Sega hockey, Chinese takeout, and a Broadway show. Hopefully, this time, with less racism.

Yesterday, while discussing with Blue all the par-taying we’re going to do, he mentioned my recent lack of blogging.

Blue: “You haven’t been blogging much lately. Are you thinking about ending it?”

Arjewtino: “I think about it sometimes. Maybe I’ll delete this blog, take a break, and then start a new, secret one. You know, where I can talk about my feelings.”

Blue: “You should call it Ar-Christian-tino.”

Arjewtino: “That’s a pretty good idea.”

Blue: “Think about everything you would write about and then write the opposite.”

Next week will be a better blogging week. I promise.

Fucking vultures.

Observing Passover is like having a systematic spring cleaning. Only with more persecution.

Part of this “cleaning” involves a major overhaul of dietary rules. Now four days (out of eight) into my ban on eating anything leavened or, you know, tasty, I’m starting to wonder if any of those fleeing Jews in Exodus couldn’t have waited just a few more minutes for the bread to rise.

I spent Passover weekend entertaining my 12-year-old cousin (again) and decided to make it the Jewiest weekend ever. So I did what any cool, older cousin would do in this situation. I got him drunk.

Actually, my friend Foxymoron got him drunk. Off kosher wine. At seder on Saturday night, Foxymoron pulled off an amazing meal, cooking the traditional foods, reciting the Passover prayers from the Haggadah, and blessing the candles and wine. And, of course, getting us all drunk.

To be fair, my cousin only had three glasses of wine, and they were more like half glasses. But that boy would not stop jabbering and laughing toward the end of the evening and talking about how much game he had with the girls at his leadership conference last week. Fucking drunk.

Earlier that day my cousin, The Princess, and I had gone down to the Mall to visit the National Air and Space Museum. Since my cousin wants to be a commercial pilot someday, he was pretty stoked.

That museum, though, is incredibly out-of-date. Between the broken displays, the low-tech features, and the barrage of immensely ugly children wandering around, it was a miracle we got out of there.

Rockets

What we look light in infrared light.

“Get off my plane!”

Of course, on the way to the museum, we had noticed a litany of police setting up along Constitution Avenue. The Princess walked up to one of the security guards nearby and asked what was going on. When he stopped staring at her cleavage, he informed her that they were preparing for a neo-Nazi rally.

“On Passover?” I yelled.

I then described to my cousin how our country’s first amendment allows bigots to scream hatred as long as they have an approved permit issued by the Park Police.

On Sunday, I tried to wash away the stench of neo-Nazis invading our city and took my cousin to see records of real Nazis at the Holocaust Museum. The Nazi-themed weekend took on an ominous tone when we noticed the Department of Agriculture’s exterior design:

Also, it being Hitler’s birthday and all (April 20) made me wonder if it all amounted to irony.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one:

Now, the Jewiest weekend since Yom Kippur involving the Ten Plagues, Hitler, and Nazis has given way to a week without eating any sandwiches, tacos, burritos, cheeseburgers, or sushi. And not drinking beer.

This has been harder than I thought and, I would argue, tougher to do than fasting for 24 hours.

For those who remember, I once wrote the following words on this blog:

…when I go out, I turn into Teen Wolf hooked on bread.
Bread? They have bread? Give me some bread! You have any more bread? Give me five motherfucking baskets of bread!

I better get a good seat in synagogue. You know, the next time I go.

During the 1982 Guerra de las Malvinas between the United Kingdom and Argentina, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” was played sarcastically by British regimental bands as they deployed to the Falkland Islands.

At least we’ve won a World Cup or two in my lifetime.

Thanks to Bridal Bird, who pretty much accounts for about 17% of all my blogging material.

I don’t have “game”.

I once walked up to a girl in the men’s razors aisle at Target and said, “So, picking up a little something for yourself?”

She responded with a look that would have made your balls fall off.

Another time, while in Boston, I was chatting with the very hot friend of a friend. She obviously wanted to get in my pants because she was asking what my plans were that evening and if I wanted to go to a bar. I told her, “I’ve been known to a have a drink or two in my lifetime”.

I didn’t hit that.

Back in my day, we didn’t call the act of flirting “game”. We called it “let’s see who gets shot down first”, which is much tougher to say when you’re drunk than you realize. I didn’t tell women they reminded me of my adorable little sister and the only “3-second rule” I was aware of had to do with dropped food.

So it intrigues me to no end these days when I hear my single female friends tell me about being “gamed” by dudes who rehash all of the same techniques that have been around since the first caveman clubbed a woman over the head. (That works, by the way.) These techniques might be moderately successful and give men the courage to hit on chicks, but in their quest to come across as unique, they are instead becoming a cliché.

Just this past weekend, my friend MJ was “peacocked” or “targeted” or whatever it’s called by a man with a misguided obsession with the Flintstones. In an e-mail yesterday, MJ broke down for me every “Pick-Up Artist” move this guy made that she had already seen on VH1:

At a party, “this guy comes up to us and asked who would make a better boyfriend, Fred Flintstone or Barney Rubble. And since we’re nice girls, we’re not going to be completely rude, but really, you want to have a conversation about that?”

“It gets worse. He doesn’t even have his facts right about the Flintstones and claims that Fred works and Barney doesn’t. It’s simply ridiculous because we don’t want to argue about the freaking Flintstones. And i saw the Fred Flintstone line on that TV show.”

Either this guy owned stock in Flintstones vitamins or he needed a new TV show from which to steal. I hear Everybody Loves Raymond reruns are a veritable treasure trove of seduction techniques.

MJ’s night with the prick-up artist (see what I did there?) continued.

“So then he makes us guess his job. We said IT guy. He then brags about not even having a TV. Wrong crowd to think that impresses us.”

Being one of the world’s foremost TV junkie, MJ was at this point beyond annoyed.

“Then he goes, you look familiar. Do i look familiar? I go no. Then he goes, well you have a twin out there. She was really cool, I would have asked her out, but she had a boyfriend. I didn’t say anything to that.”

When “what’s your sign”-era attempts don’t work, you should always try sounding worldly.

“He then tried to convince us that he learned how to do massage therapy in Iraq.”

Maybe not.

I know I’m no expert at hitting on women. But the thing is, when I was interested in someone, I wouldn’t make it a game of making passes. I found that trying to hit on a woman was usually the best way not to go home with her. The trick, if there was one, was just to come across as a comfortable and confident man. That’s it.

I asked Roissy once if he felt like the “meat market” was being saturated by these self-professing “pick-up artists”.

He said, essentially, that yeah, it was, and that certain “routines”, like the “best friends test”, had become off limits due to its overuse.

I think MJ explained it perfectly:

“Obviously, you have issues if you are using lines like that. I don’t understand why this stupid approach is being encouraged. and it makes for REALLY awkward situations.”

PHOTO CREDIT

In the past week, I have been told by two separate people, in two wholly different settings, that I look old.

The first came thanks to a picture GoPats took of me at a Nats game. The second, just a few days later, courtesy of my friend Beth at a happy hour, when she noticed how long my hair has gotten and how it, I suppose, has affected the way I look.

I have processed their comments, mulled their meanings over, and come up with this carefully constructed synopsis about my challenged youth: WHAT THE FUCK?

I have mentioned before how much I’m looking forward to old age and everything it promises, mainly a healthy amount of dementia and telling kids to get off my lawn. But I didn’t mean that I wanted to actually look old when it happened.

Luckily for me, my 12-year-old cousin is in town this week at some young whippersnappers’ leadership conference and he stayed with me for the weekend. I say “luckily” because what I have obviously needed lately is an injection of youth (emotional age not withstanding). My pallid countenance has been starved for an exuberance that can only be found by hanging out with a kid nearly a third of my age.

Before he arrived, I said to myself, Self, what should you do with this rapscallion? I mean, what does a 12-year-old boy actually like to do? What do they think about? Unfortunately, getting him drunk and taking him to his first strip club was probably not feasible. Possible, just not logistically plausible.

So instead, I decided to look back at what I liked to do when I was his age (20 fucking years ago) and what I would have wanted to do with my cool, older cousin. I found an old journal (not a diary, diaries are for chicks who believe in unicorns and dot their “i’s” with flowers) that I kept as a 12-year-old. After reading through it for clues, I realized something important. I was a weenie.

The journal centers mostly around my crush on a girl named Tina. I wrote some really anguishing sentences about her, like:

The only one who knows I like her is [Blue]. I love talking to her. Now when we talk, her voice doesn’t crack like it used to. OK, get this. Predita asked me to go to her birthday party this Saturday night. So I made up my mind. I was going to ask Tina to go. Not knowing she had already been invited, I asked Predita if I could invite her. She asks, ‘We have another Tina?’ I gave her a puzzled look. She continues, ‘I already invited her. Why, you two going together?’ She said it in a sweet voice. I told her no, I just wanted to know if she wanted to go. I was so embarrassed.”

You’re embarrassed, 12-year-old Arjewtino? How do you think reading this makes me feel?

I had picked him up at Dulles on Friday, bypassing the TSA security line with a special pass since his parents wanted me to meet him at the gate. While his flight disembarked, a Virgin America employee announced over the loudspeaker, “Will the parents of [my cousin] please come to the front?”

I started to walk forward when she saw me and continued on the loudspeaker, “…or the daddy?”

I got to the gate and started chatting with her. I mentioned that his parents had wanted me to meet him at the gate.

“Oh, you’re not the father?” she asked me.

“No, I’m the cousin,” I told her.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!”

“That’s ok,” I told her, “it’s perfectly conceivable that I could have a 12-year-old son.”

Yup, definitely not feeling old at all.

I ended up taking my cousin to the Nats game on Saturday. I was planning on buying some cheap $10 seats in the stratosphere, but when we got in line at the box office, some random dude came up to us and handed me tickets to two seats in the 131 section, three rows from the field.

“Just take them,” he said. I kept waiting for the catch but he walked away. The seats were tremendous. And though my cousin, who is from the San Francisco area, wore his Giants jersey which I threatened to trash, I wore my Dodgers jersey and we both put on Nats caps.

We stayed through the rain delay, eating chili dogs that looked like, according to my cousin, “barf”, and watching video games in the Playstation 3 center behind right-center field. I felt young, vibrant, like a kid again. Let’s see someone call me old now.

On our way out of the stadium, my cousin asked me for a bucket of cotton candy. I thought about how much I used to love cotton candy, how I used to beg my parents for some whenever we went to a carnival or a Dodgers game. Now, though, all I could do was wince.

My cousin looked at me and said, “You look like your dad.”

Yup. Not old at all.

This guy.

I know, you can’t see my thumbs, but trust me, they’re here.

As an early birthday present, Blue bought us two tickets to watch my home country’s soccer team (currently ranked number one in the world) play my adopted country’s team at the Meadowlands on June 8. It cost nearly $200 for both tickets, thanks to Ticketmaster’s service, handling, transaction, shipping, and ass raping charges.

After buying the tickets, Blue, who has lived in Manhattan for three years, and I talked about the stadium:

Blue: “Where do the Giants play again?”

Arjewtino: “The Meadowlands.”

Blue:“Oh, right.”

Arjewtino:“Way to go, New Yorker.”

Blue:“I don’t even know how to get there. I think you need to take a bus or something.”

Arjewtino:“Yeah, this is going to work out great.”

I have seen the Argentina soccer team play many, many times on TV. I watched them beat England in the 1998 World Cup in the kitchen of Gaucho Grill where I worked as a waiter. I saw them get eliminated from competition in a Buenos Aires bar in 2002, then had to walk past grown men crying in the fetal position. I raced to the Block Island ferry in 2006 on my birthday just so I could catch them beat Mexico in a bar that only cared about the Red Sox.

But I have never seen them play live. Until now.

My dad still tells me the story of watching Argentina win the 1978 World Cup in Buenos Aires as the greatest moment of his life.

The story is always the same. How he threw himself down several rows of seats after the final whistle blew. How the chaos dragged him in his stupor over the heads of thousands of delirious fans. When I ask him why he didn’t take me, he always responds, “You were three.”

So?

The “friendly” on June 8 against the U.S. soccer team may not live up to the moment of watching Argentina win its first of two World Cup championships, but at least I will be there. Section 113, Row 8, on the Argentina side, singing, jumping, yelling, cursing, happy to not be born in Guatemala.

I predict a 4-0 score.

There is a school of thought that scoffs at the notion that we can ever photograph a moment as it really was. We crop, frame, eliminate, and choose what we decide to photograph, in a way robbing the viewer of what we were truly experiencing.

I think about this whenever I see the Cherry Blossoms. Thousands of tourists jockey for position to get “the perfect shot”, one that usually means not showing the other tourists competing for the same shot. But the tourists were there. They were part of your experience. So why try to eliminate them? Why not just photograph them in the scene?

That’s what I did on Saturday afternoon. Instead of taking photos of the Cherry Blossoms and pretending that I was there alone with the seasonal flowers, I decided to capture them as they are this time of year: coveted and documented by hordes of visitors (and locals).

After all, anyone can take a decent photo of the Cherry Blossoms. But can anyone take a decent photo of the tourists taking photos of the Cherry Blossoms?

Whether this “meta” form of photography is intriguing or not is up to the beholder. To me, it was just a fun process. I saw tourists crouching, straining, pointing, climbing, sitting, lying, aiming, and bending over like human origami, each one eager to document just how much they love our Cherry Blossoms.

Some got yelled at for climbing the trees. Others acted frustrated they couldn’t get a clear shot. Most wandered around aimless, clicking away, oblivious to the moment. Here are some of my favorite shots.

Nearly one year ago, I told Bridal Bird in the comments section of one of my blog posts how much I detested United Airlines for making me watch the movie Fever Pitch when I flew to Japan two years ago.

Since then, the Bird (sadly an Orioles fan who probably doesn’t even remember what it’s like to cheer for a winner in her lifetime) has been perpetuating a vicious rumor that I actually liked the movie starring Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore.

This rumor has not abated.

During an e-mail exchange yesterday between INPY, Jess, and myself, the following conversation occurred:

Jess: Whenever I see the phillies I think of when my dad took me to the all-star game there. There was a bit where the players came round and shook hands w/ fans. Darren Daulton walks by and a teased-out-hair Phillies chick turns to her lady friend and says, in Philly-tainted accent, ‘LOOK! At that ay-us (ass).’ My dad and I still say it when we see the Phils highlights….

INPY: Holy CRAP that’s hysterical! Wasn’t something like that in Fever Pitch? Arjewtino?

I forwarded the e-mails to Bridal Bird to show her how she’s ruined my life. She responded with this: